Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeffrox
"i personally witnessed a Maser supervising the welding of a support bracket for an LRIT antenna while it was drizzling."
|
This may be one of the most important concepts of this entire discussion. Here you have described a Master supervising, which is his job. The subject matter expert in this case study is supposed to be the guy holding the welding torch in his hand. So if your engineer type who is welding in the rain doesn't have enough experience to stop the job, what is wrong with this picture? What's wrong is that the master signed off on a hot permit based on information provided by someone who is supposed to know better. He has been poorly served by the person for whose work he is responsible. If the welder kills himself welding in the rain, guess who else fries? Not the C/E, who is warm and dry down in the basement. You've given us your first person account of what I detected in your first post: The near total lack of communication between deck and engine departments aboard your ships. You don't have a problem with your Masters nearly as much as you appear to have a systemic culture issue within your organization that needs to be changed and brought into the 21st century.
A critical piece that is missing in your understanding of the nature of command authority is the fact that you've never held it. There is no land-based parallel authority that I can think of. The absolute responsibility for one's crew, cargo, and ship is an awesome one, and is not for the faint at heart. You've expressed your opinion that the Master's only real concern is navigation, while navigation is actually the second mate's primary concern. The master has the whole ball of wax to keep track of, and having a great Chief downstairs goes a long way towards making the master's job easier. Truth be told, I haven't met too many C/Es who want to be legally in charge of everything. They've got plenty to keep them busy and they are delegated an enormous amount of responsibility and authority by the master anyhow. Plus, they'd have to come up for air once in a while if they were in charge of the whole thing. They get bloody noses at that altitude.